It was time to go on a road trip again. This time it was to Madurai and Thanjavur; two towns in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Unlike most of our trips, this one decided almost impromptu; well not entirely. My wife decided to attend a yoga course in Madurai. We had been talking about visiting the famous Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai for quite a while. Another temple we wanted to visit was the famous Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur. That was got added to my list ever since I had watched a documentary about it being an engineering marvel. So making the decision to do the road trip along with the yoga course was not a difficult one to make.

The broad plan was that my wife would head off to Madurai along with her friends for the yoga course. I would reach Madurai the day after her course completed. And that is what happened. My drive to Madurai was smooth, with some excellent highways. I reached around noon. We had a booked a hotel such that the main temple was close enough to walk to it. Check-in done and a quick lunch at a nearby restaurant, it was time for a short break. It was afternoon and it was pretty hot. So we decided to take short nap before heading out to explore.

There were a few places of interest that we had shortlisted to visit in Madurai. It was time to walk around the city and explore them. And we were determined to walk to them as far as possible. The first was a visit to the Azhagar Kovil (aka Alagar Kovil). To our luck, we arrived at the perfect time when they were going to perform the rituals to wake up the deities. The temple was actually a complex with several deities with their own shrine. A local lady seeing that we were not familiar with the complex, took it upon herself to be the guide so that we caught the rituals at the various temples in the right order. This really made our experience superlative.

Photography is not allowed in any of the temples in Madurai. So I am able to share only photos of the exterior. But trust me, the insides are really beautiful.

Next, we walked to the Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal. It is the palace built in 1636 by a king of the Madurai Nayak dynasty. Sadly it was not open to the public. I think it was undergoing renovations. We could only see the closed entrance door.

Given that it was Good Friday, I also wanted to visited a church. Thankfully the St. Mary’s Cathedral was just across the street from the palace. So we walked over to join the evening prayers happening. We ended up spending the next 45 minutes there.

We then decided to walk to the Meenakshi Amman temple (aka Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple), the main temple, to get some bearing of what to expect. It was very crowded as there was a procession with a deity happening just outside the temple. So we abandoned any thought of trying to go into the temple complex. We were going to stick to our original plan to go for darshan (i.e. visiting the deity in the sanctum sanctorum) in the early hours of the day.

Next morning we reached the temple in the wee hours of the morning; 4:30am. There was already a queue. It took us around 1.5 hours to get to see the main deity after which we went around the temple. Trust me, it was worth it. The inside of the temple is really grand; the longest hall has 985 carved pillars! And the temple complex is vast. We finally exited from the temple complex by around 7:30am thoroughly that we had done the visit. Here is a photo of me standing in front of West Tower entrance.

We headed back to our hotel. Post breakfast, we checked out and started our journey towards Thanjavur. We however wanted to visit two other sites around Madurai before leaving the city. The first was a quick stop at the Vandiyur Mariamman Teppakulam.

Mad about Birding and Travel

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